IF anyone ever wondered whether it was talent or sustained systematic training that makes athletes so good, they need only look at Joshua Gordon, a professional mediator in Boston.
Mr. Gordon ran cross-country in college before stopping completely to take up baseball. Six years later, in 1999, he decided, almost as a lark, to run the Boston Marathon. He joined a program to learn how to run longer distances, a process that involved gradually increasing the length of his runs and focusing only on distance, not speed.
He finished the marathon in a little over four hours, not especially fast for a man of 24, but he did meet his goal. “I was thrilled,” he said.
And so he found himself edging back into running, entering shorter races, 5 and 10 kilometers. He tried to train on his own, but he never did particularly well until he decided to start serious, rigorous marathon training with the Boston Athletic Association. He received coached track workouts once a week, four to six coached runs of 18 to 23 miles along the marathon course, and he had a group of skilled and talented athletes to run with.
He went from being a middle-of-the-pack runner to someone who either wins or finishes high in the final standing. And he has trained for and run every Boston Marathon for the last eight years, getting faster each time. On Monday, he posted a time of 2 hours 39 minutes 4 seconds, finishing 161st out of 23,000 runners. It was his best time even though he ran with a bad cold and had cramping in his legs and feet.
Mr. Gordon found that training, if done right, is the ultimate performance enhancer, with effects that can dwarf those of illegal drugs, like the blood-boosting drug EPO, as well as legal stimulants like caffeine. Still, it seems, too few amateur athletes take it seriously and fewer still do it right. Exercise physiologists and coaches say most people who want to run, swim, cycle or row faster or improve in almost any sport do not appreciate what can be accomplished with training nor how to do it.
“Your average person who would like to improve probably does not have a good grip on these issues,” said James M. Pivarnik, an exercise physiologist at Michigan State University and president-elect of the American College of Sports Medicine.
Dr. William O. Roberts, a specialist in family medicine at the University of Minnesota and the former president of the American College of Sports Medicine, agreed. Dr. Roberts, an inline skater who competes in skating marathons, said: “If your goal is to finish, you just need to skate enough so that you can cover the distance. If your goal is to be faster, you have to train.”
There are training programs everywhere — in magazines, books, on the Internet. But eventually, exercise physiologists say, most people need guidance from a group with experienced coaches, like the one Mr. Gordon joined, or from personal coaches.
Training, though, can require such a commitment over so many years that many drop out. Not Mr. Gordon, who loves to train. And that love of serious training, coaches say, is often what distinguishes a good athlete from a mediocre one.
“Any great athlete who accomplishes anything, anywhere, loves to train,” said Tom Fleming, my coach and a former elite distance runner who twice won the New York City Marathon.
It’s not that talent is irrelevant. Truly talented athletes can be better without training than many average people can be with training. But most people are not in that elite athlete realm and, for them, training can mean the difference between a good performance and a poor one.
Carl Foster, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, gave an example of what training can do. A man who has been running but not training might run a 5K race at a pace of 7:45 a mile. If he trained for six months, he could get his pace down to 6:10.
The biggest effects are in untrained people, said Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas. “Elite athletes’ performance is getting too close to the ceiling or upper limit,” he said. “There is not much space to improve.”
But even people who are starting reach a plateau within six months or so. After that, real gains are incremental and hard won. Yet people regress if they ease up on training.
Many find that they need a program with experienced coaches, like the group Mr. Gordon joined, to succeed. The art of coaching is to keep athletes in a delicate balance, stressing their bodies to get stronger but pulling back before they are injured.
“What’s peak condition?” asked Dr. Pivarnik, the exercise physiologist. “It’s one step from falling off a cliff.”
And no matter how good the coaching or the training program, injuries are all but inevitable.
“The moment I say I want to put a number on my chest, that’s when I start saying I accept the risk of injury,” Dr. Foster said. “It’s a decision people make and I think it’s a good one. But you’ve got to accept it. Training is not totally innocuous.”
Then there’s the question of just what aspects of a person’s physiology can improve. Training affects both the ability of the heart to pump blood and the ability of the body to properly use the blood it gets. You can cross-train — do other sports that get your heart rate up — to regulate how your heart pumps. But to improve your muscles’ ability to use that blood, you have to train by doing that sport.
“If you are training to run, you need to run,” Dr. Roberts said. “If you are training to inline skate, you need to inline skate.
In general, Dr. Pivarnik said, those who have an inborn ability to develop great cardiovascular fitness are the best athletes. But he said there also are great athletes who make up for a relative deficiency in their ability to significantly increase their aerobic fitness by training their muscles to use 85 to 90 percent of their capacity for extended periods of time.
Dr. Pivarnik sees this annually when he and his colleagues test the school’s basketball and hockey teams.
“They all run and skate up and down, and play at the same speed,” he said. “You would think they would all have the same aerobic fitness. But they don’t.”
Coaches and exercise physiologists caution that it can take a long period of sustained, consistent training to reach your potential.
That’s what happened with Lara Johnson, a 28-year-old graduate student in Boston. A runner in high school and college, she trained seriously for her first Boston Marathon in 2007, finishing in 3:12. She continued training, and last year, though she was injured from January until March, her time in the marathon in April was 3:11:38. Her time this year was 2:58:33, making her the 55th woman to finish. “It’s taken years,” Ms. Johnson said. “A lot of it is your body progressing. It’s consistent training rather than going out for one race. I’ve broken through a lot of plateaus. I’m a faster runner than I was in college.”
Ms. Johnson said that she has improved so much that she has a new goal: qualifying to run the marathon in the next United States Olympic trials.
“It’s only been in the last year that I finally got to the point where I can even say that,” Ms. Johnson said.
I often see things that perplex me as a coach. But nothing stumps me more than the usual pre-race routine of a triathlete.
